nickie
on Feb. 6, 2014, 11:17 p.m.
<p>So, I was wondering why <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Spheroid.html">Wolfram MathWorld</a> was giving a different formula for the spheroid's surface and why it didn't work when I tried it...
They used complex numbers! Math vs. "look it up": 1-0. :-)</p>

nickie
on Oct. 12, 2014, 8:36 p.m.
<p>Guys, if a language implementation is not clever enough to make these two run equally fast <strong>in the case that w is a number</strong>, then all of us (in the PL community) should go home and pick up a new hobby. </p>
<p>Now, if you want to argue that this particular trick is not quite as easy as it seems in a dynamically typed language like Python, where multiplication and exponentiation can be overloaded for user defined objects and, in general, the compiler won't know what the dynamic type of w will be, then I'll have to agree. But this comment definitely does not generalize to statically typed languages.</p>